Video conferencing has ceased to be an exotic concept and is increasingly penetrating our everyday work environment. She went beyond the meeting rooms and became available in the workplace of employees and mobile devices. This widespread use of video conferencing is facilitated by the growing transition from purely hardware solutions (such as Polycom, Cisco, LifeSize) to software and hardware. There are several reasons for this transition, but the main ones are as follows:
This article, on the example of a specific meeting room, describes how it is possible to equip a room with video conferencing facilities that is simple and relatively inexpensive.
The meeting room is now in almost any company. This is the place where meetings between employees, meetings with clients, discussion of projects are held. Recently, meeting rooms are also used for video conferencing with remote participants. The equipment of such meeting rooms allows participants to hear and see each other at a distance in real time, to share content (presentations, slides, videos).
As a rule, meeting rooms have a metric of 25-30 square meters and a capacity of 8-10 people. These rooms are medium-sized meeting rooms.
Before turning to specific examples of equipment, you should talk about the modular approach.
Today, equipping a meeting room with video conferencing equipment has ceased to be a highly specialized task. Previously, a hardware terminal with a predetermined composition of components was almost the only option for VKS equipment. Now the personal computer with the software client of the video conferencing center becomes the central hub, for example: Skype, Polycom Realpresence Desktop or TrueConf.
Both of these options solve the problem - they provide participants with video calls, but they have different approaches:
The second variant of equipment embodies a modular approach to equipping a meeting room, which involves the separation of all equipment into several subsystems, the composition of each of which can be changed without losing the overall functionality. Video and audio signals of each of these subsystems are connected to the client terminal on the basis of a personal computer.
- Software solutions for video conferencing are more affordable without losing functionality.
- Software solutions for video conferencing provide greater flexibility in equipping workplaces and meeting rooms, in contrast to the standardized composition of hardware terminals.
This article, on the example of a specific meeting room, describes how it is possible to equip a room with video conferencing facilities that is simple and relatively inexpensive.
The concept of a standard meeting room
The meeting room is now in almost any company. This is the place where meetings between employees, meetings with clients, discussion of projects are held. Recently, meeting rooms are also used for video conferencing with remote participants. The equipment of such meeting rooms allows participants to hear and see each other at a distance in real time, to share content (presentations, slides, videos).
As a rule, meeting rooms have a metric of 25-30 square meters and a capacity of 8-10 people. These rooms are medium-sized meeting rooms.
Modular approach to equipping meeting rooms
Before turning to specific examples of equipment, you should talk about the modular approach.
Today, equipping a meeting room with video conferencing equipment has ceased to be a highly specialized task. Previously, a hardware terminal with a predetermined composition of components was almost the only option for VKS equipment. Now the personal computer with the software client of the video conferencing center becomes the central hub, for example: Skype, Polycom Realpresence Desktop or TrueConf.
Both of these options solve the problem - they provide participants with video calls, but they have different approaches:
- The option based on a specialized hardware terminal involves placing typed equipment in a room — a video camera with the parameters offered by the manufacturer, a microphone, also a specific model, a central computing unit with certain functionality, and so on. Connectors for connecting equipment to the central unit are often proprietary. This makes it difficult to replace components. For example, the Polycom company produces video cameras with a non-standard HDCI connector, which without “dancing with a tambourine” is difficult to connect to anything other than the hardware terminals of the same company. This imposes certain difficulties in connecting cameras through a video switch, to build more complex video conferencing systems. The flexibility of upgrading and scaling in such hardware solutions is a bit
- The option based on a personal computer, equipped in the simplest case with a video camera and microphone, gives more flexibility in choosing equipment, as the connection interfaces (USB, HDMI, 3.5 mm analog connector) are standardized and present in any modern personal computer.
The second variant of equipment embodies a modular approach to equipping a meeting room, which involves the separation of all equipment into several subsystems, the composition of each of which can be changed without losing the overall functionality. Video and audio signals of each of these subsystems are connected to the client terminal on the basis of a personal computer.
- Subsystem technology television. In essence, this is a video camera system. For large conference rooms, several video cameras are needed to capture all participants in the video. In the case of an average meeting room, a single video camera with a suitable viewing angle, swivel lens and optical zoom (PTZ) is sufficient.
- Subsystem display information. This may be a projector or a screen, but recently LCD panels are increasingly being used because of their availability and convenience - no need, as is the case with a projector, to specifically dim the room or periodically change light bulbs. When choosing a TV size, you should be guided by the following rule: the distance from the TV to the closest participants should be at least one diagonal of the TV, and to the farthest participant - no more than four diagonals.
It is clear that for a long room, based on this recommendation, you will need a large diagonal TV. In some cases, the best options for the display subsystem become a video wall or duplicate screens.
Video wall - a set of display devices (projection video cubes, plasma or LCD displays), which are combined with each other and form a single screen that allows you to play large volumes of information from different sources in a multi-window mode. The issue of video walls is very voluminous and is beyond the scope of this article. But the main parameters that you should pay attention to when choosing a video wall are: its size in inches, the width of the seam between the panels (usually 5.5 mm), the mode of operation, video sources and the functionality that the video wall controller must implement.
When collaborating with documents, the use of auxiliary panels that duplicate an image from the main screen becomes much more useful than one big screen. In this case, you must use a video splitter. - Subsystem sound capture. The wide-directional frog microphones, which are part of the hardware terminals, are replaced by speakerphones - devices that combine an array of microphones and a speaker. They connect to a computer via USB and provide effective echo and noise reduction, as well as a large radius of sound capture. In addition, speakerphones have the ability to cascade into a circuit to expand the sound capture zone.
- Subsystem sounding room. There are a lot of options - from speakerphones and loudspeakers built into the LCD TV and ending with ceiling loudspeakers that evenly sound the whole room.
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